Submitted by yourSAS t3_z7t0sf in technology
Not a "first". In the 50's the US government through Lockheed was developing a replacement for the U2. It was going to be bigger, faster and powered by hydrogen. Pratt & Whitney developed the engine for the project. Project 304.
Problem was they couldn't figure out how to store enough cryogenic hydrogen and keep it cryogenic to make it work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan
EDIT: Pratt got the engine working pretty well. Lockheed couldn't get the CL-400 figured out. Pratt's work with hydrogen ended up helping them develop the RL-10 upper stage rocket engine.
>Problem was they couldn't figure out how to store enough cryogenic hydrogen and keep it cryogenic to make it work.
That's still an unsolved problem. Liquid hydrogen only has 1/4 the energy density of gasoline, although it is significantly lighter per joule of energy. Some more research is also needed to figure out a way to efficiently split water, IIRC current methods lose a significant amount of energy to heat. Long term, I think battery technology will be the best bet for cars and airplanes and we might see hydrogen in use for grid balancing.
If I had to guess, I'd think the majority of hydrogen research funding comes from fossil fuel companies as they'll be entirely obsolete if the planet shifts away from liquid fuel.
I was just looking at the Google server building here in my area and it’s really too bad we can’t build something next to it to take advantage of the heat it generates to cool the servers. The same would be useful for hydrogen, if we could just put a useful business next door that needs the heat, we could start being more efficient.
I used to build smart homes with automation etc. I once ducted the waste heat from the server racks into the elevator shaft in the middle of the house to capture some heat in the winter with a vent to switch the exhaust outside in the summer (this was in Canada)
A home with a server rack? Sounds expensive. Pretty good idea though. I was thinking about our dryer vent and how to capture that wasted heat in the colder months.
The clientele I worked for typically spent anywhere from 2-20 million dollars on their homes with our contracts ranging anywhere from $50000 to a million for all the A/V, lighting control, security, surveillance, and full systems integration with HVAC and gates, garage doors, hot tubs, self playing pianos, etc. Whatever they wanted. This was the high end of home automation, mind you.
Yeah, a bit out of my price range. Haha
I always thought jet engines would eat every combustible liquid or gas you give em. Another problem but the storage would be that hydrogen is manyfold worse than CO/2 for the climate when it escapes, and that is the mature problem with it, it's atomic weight is just to light and it crawls out of almost everything.
Edit: Sry but the stuff with the to light of an atomic weight to crawl out of contaiers was helium I guess, but put the production of hydrogen into an industrial scale it could still get messy.
They did test hydrogen with a standard j-57. The 304 was a highly optimized configuration. It had a massive heat exchanger after the cumbustors and it looked more like a steam turbine inside. Lots of tiny bladed compressor stages
Combusting hydrogen that starts in the liquid state is tricky. At 1 atmosphere, hydrogen evaporates into a gas at 33K, but oxygen freezes at 54K. On top of that, combustion occurs at much higher pressures in a jet engine. So, while it's definitely possible to make it work, you need an engine design that significantly pre-heats the incoming fuel. The space shuttle main engines do this by scavenging heat from the exhaust and are a marvel of engineering.
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